“A nuclear reactor? Are you craz—?” But then he stopped—he was doing that a lot, as if the ideas that flooded his brain used so much energy that he was unable to budget enough brainpower to move his lips. “We ... we can’t do that!” He didn’t sound too convincing, even to himself.

“Sure you can. We’ve had megawatt-power generators smaller than my mommy’s car for years.”

“Sure—fission reactors.”

“Right.”

“Well, you can’t put a nuclear reactor aboard an aircraft!”

“Why not?”

“Why not? It’s ... it’s . ..” Jon couldn’t think of a reason why right away. “Because ... because no one wants a plane with a nuclear reactor flying over their homes, that’s why.”

“I guess,” Kelsey said. “We’ve had ships with nuclear reactors sailing past our homes for a long time—but an airplane is different, I guess.” She continued to study the inner plumbing of the fuselage. “But the LADAR is a diode-pumped solid-state laser, right?”

“Sure. But it’s only one-tenth the power of the SSL— not enough to destroy a ballistic missile at the ranges we want to engage at.”

“But if we had more power?”

“The smallest diode-pumped laser in the one-megawatt range that I know of is the size of a living room, and it has its own transformer farm to power it.”

Kelsey looked up at the B-52 bomber. “This plane is a lot bigger than a living room, Jon,” she said with a grin.

“We can’t do that kind of engineering with .. .” But he stopped—again—as his mind began to race. “I wonder ... if we used a different pumping system . .. ?”

Kelsey turned around and pointed to the Lancelot missile. “We can take your plasma-yield warhead,” Kelsey said, “and use it to pump the laser.”

“Pump a laser with. .. with plasma?” Jon gasped. “I.. . I’ve never heard of that before.”

“You thought of it years ago, Jon,” Kelsey said. “I read about it in one of the magazine articles you wrote. You were going to use lasers to create a plasma field— Lawrence Livermore built their inertial confinement plasma generator based on your ideas—and then you talked about the feasibility of using a plasma discharge to pump a laser. The system would have generated its own power and its own fuel—a virtually unlimited power supply. Why don’t we do it? Take similar SSL arrays you use for the laser radar. You have four arrays on the Dragon. How many laser emitters in each array?”

“Three hundred and forty.”

“Oh, boy,” Kelsey cooed happily. “We shoot the lasers into an inertial confinement chamber loaded up with deuterium and tritium fuel pellets and then channel the plasma field into the laser generator. What was the power level of the one they built at Lawrence Livermore?”